Aqua dripped off Victor’s chin after he splashed his face with the water by the stream. With one eye close, he looked at the darkened sky above him. A trickle of light can be seen poured from the horizon as the sun began to rise. After letting out a yawn, Victor made his way back to camp, but before he took a seat near the smoldering fire, he turned his gaze at the Katana wrapped in fabric that leaned against a tree. Its handle was exposed, and surprisingly it looks way darker than he imagined it. The way the black and red threads wrapped around it was messy; almost if someone that had no experience fixes it in a rush

However, there was something amiss about the fabric covering the sword, a small detail, the smell of iron, a red spot; he knew well what it was. There’s no mistaking it, that the red spot came from a trickle of blood. It had dried out, but not quite dry to the point of barren. The spot still damped from the look of it. In conclusion, that red spot must have happened sometimes around yesterday when they were still in town.

Victor reached out to the handle, his heart thumped hastily, it was dark and the sense of dread clung onto him till the point of his legs became noodles. It took one inch of the bare blade exposed to send off a flurry of miasma around him, scream of pain and agony cried out in the faint distance and thousands of haunting eyes were watching him from the dark corner of the forest. He was frozen in place while his hands jittered uncontrollably while the air was slowly searing his skin. There’s a tremendous pain inside his chest as if something was forcefully pulling the essence of his life from deep within using a pair of tar soaked thongs.

Just like that, he was out cold. Victor dropped to the ground. Darkness enveloped his mind. He fell into a twister of painful screech and agonizing scream.

But, someone snapped him back out. Victor woke up yelling and throwing his arms out trying to protect himself from nothing. Keiko stared him down with flattened lips; the Katana now in her left hand, but she simply let out a sigh and wrapped the fabric tightly before leaning it against the tree once more.

“Wha-What was that?” asked Victor with a shaken voice.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Keiko dismissed his question.

“The sword! That thing is haunted.”

“Haunted?”

“Yeah!” snapped Victor.

“Are we going to continue your training?”

Victor unknowingly nodded his head and looked back at the woman, “O-Okay..”

“A small pebble, A small splash, A big pebble, A big splash, What is constant?”

“Water.”

“Good. A single rock in a stream, what maintained?’

“Water.”

“Now you get it. My fighting techniques required you to be flexible as water. Unwavering as water. Unfazed as water,” said Keiko as her hand slithered like water then she stopped abruptly and asked; “Now, why did I hit you earlier?”

“You mean back in town?”

“Correct.”

“To train me?”

“Your answer is not wrong, but it can be better. You need to be like water, remain unchanged. No matter...how rough, or smooth the flow is. That’s why you need to learn how to get hit and still stand afterward. People will be afraid and sequentially, they will create an illusion of you.”

“What kind of illusion?”

“An illusion of unyielding strength,” Keiko took a seat across from Victor.

“Wait, when you pushed me off that bridge, it wasn’t just a test, but to train me?”

“Oh, sure… if you see it that way,” shrugged Keiko as she took a sip of tea.

Victor pulled back his head with a raised eyebrow, “I’m getting a vibe here. Are you sure you’ve trained someone before?”

“Nope. You’re my first student.”

“Did I just dig my grave?” Victor facepalm himself.

“Don’t worry about it, I won’t let you die. Hurt badly, possibly, but not death. Besides, I know how to hold back.” Keiko walked toward the young man with a fist readied by her side.

“Wait! Not this again!”

Thus Victor’s training began, he was hit almost every day. The pain was excruciating at first, but he withstood it as much as he could. When he couldn't, he fainted from exhaustion, but every time he woke up again, he was treated caringly by Keiko. She fed him large meals, and every time she served it, Victor munched down that meal like a pack of wolves. It wasn’t just getting hit, sometimes, she asked him to run back and forth down a path multiple times, climb a steep cliff with a large rock attached to him, or simply pushed him into a raging river again and asked him to survive on his own.

However, it wasn’t all serious, one time he found out the bag he’s been carrying the whole time contained nothing but rocks, and she was adding them in secret. They got a couple of laughs about it, but after Victor found out, Keiko completely didn't hold back as she put more and more rocks into it. Victor could only grunt and continue his training. He wished he never found out about it. As they said; ignorance is bliss.

Except there were days that it wasn’t only training his body, she showed him a couple of stances, where to put his feet, his arms, and how to angle his body in a fight. Soon after, she taught him how to parry an attack, how to reduce incoming damage. Until they arrived at their next destination, and it wasn’t anything Victor had expected.

“Where are we?” said Victor as his eyes sparkled with curiosity.

“Somewhere spiritual.”

They walked down a path lined with floating arches that were made from pure obsidian on both sides of the path. They were floating off each other, off the ground, but something was engraved into it. Victor knew what it was very well. They were Archaic writing, the long and forgotten writing of a mysterious folk that precedes Frozehaven or even the entire world.

Victor took out the notebook he made himself, and a piece of charcoal he collected. Then he began writing and sketching what he saw. Keiko looked at the young man behind her and sighed. She then walked back to him and pulled him away before he could finish the sketch. As they walked up the thousand steps of stairs, they finally arrived at the doorstep of a magical place of floating rocks and glowing crystals.

Keiko walked in as if the sight was normal to her, but Victor couldn’t help himself but be dazzled at the magnificent architecture that this place had. As the young man began to look around, Keiko simply shook her head slightly and went into a mediation room of incense and offerings. Inside; she sat on her legs and muttered something as if she was praying.

“Woah...” As Victor explored further, he found nothing, but empty rooms with scribbles words etched into the walls.

“Fascinating.” A gentle voice echoed from the room around the corner.

Victor turned the corner and saw a middle-aged man squatting in the middle of the room with his back toward him. That looks creepy and borderline ominous. He has some kind of puffed out wrapping around his head. It is too dark to see any distinctive feature, so Victor steps closer.

“Hello?”

“Eek!” Yelped the man like a little girl before stumbling forward and hit his head against the wall.

Suddenly, the room shook and the entrance was closed off behind them. The light was cut off and left them in darkness. Victor backed against the wall quickly as a small gap appeared on the floor and split the room into two. As sudden as the tremble, the floor gave out and both of them fell into a deep hole. They screamed and hugged each other mid-air before falling through some sort of jelly-made barrier and into a luminescent pool below. The floor above closed back up, leaving them with only silence and the light from the luminescent water.

Victor swam to the bank while dragging the man behind him, he dragged him up the slippery hill and took a seat right next to him. After calming his breath down, Victor looked around him: a dark cave with the same obsidian architecture protruded from the rugged cave wall. After another second look, it was pretty beautiful. A concerning thought pop, Victor brought his bag forward and looked inside it then let out a sigh of relief. His books weren’t soaked from water. In fact, his entire clothes aren’t wet, that’s certainly weird.

The man beside him grumbled nonsensical words, Victor crawled closer and shook the man's shoulders, “Hey, wake up!”

“Huh?” The man grunted, now that he took another look at him, this man certainly came from Ghadah: the thick brows and lips along with dark brown skin. The young man pulled up his hood and hid his face before anything unsavory happened.

“Where are we?”

“It couldn’t be. I finally unlocked the entrance! Do you know what this means?” The man jerked his body upright and glanced around him with a wide smile.

“What?”

“I was right. I was right! Woooo!!” He raised himself while shouting his overwhelming joy.

“I still don’t understand."

“Don’t you get it? It was the correct answer. I studied them for ages and tracked every breadcrumb they ever left, and here I am. Oh, I forgot my manners. It’s a pleasure to meet you, my name is Gustav Zola,” he shook the young man's hand so vigorously.

“No way. You...You are that infamous writer.”

“The one and only,” Gustav bowed elegantly.

“You wrote that book. I’m a fan.”

“An f-fan? Hmm, an unexpected surprise, but a pleasant one sure. But still, it is a pleasure to meet an f-fan, and you are?”

“Victor.”

“Victor? No family name?”

“Ah, no.” Victor’s face darkened a bit.

“Oh, I didn’t mean to pry. Anyhow, since you are an f-fan, can you guess where we are?”

“In your book, you mentioned that you were searching for the Lost Archive.”

“Correct. You, my boy, may have stumbled into it accidentally either by sheer luck, or the will of destiny herself, but here we are. I present to you the Lost Archive. Every single information of their mysterious world was stored in a vault just like this, across the world. I still couldn't believe it myself. To be in this place was a dream of mine, but to actually achieve it. Simply breathtaking.”

“You mean every single history and knowledge that the Archaic have. Everything? All of it is stored here?”

“Yes, everything. Follow me quickly, we don't have much time to lose. I need to explore every bit of this place before my heart gave out from the sheer excitement.” Gustav skipped happily toward the only other path this cave has but was stopped immediately by Victor.

“Wait! I was with someone. I need to tell her where I am or she will be worried.”

“Do not worry, my f-fan. You see up there?” Gustave pointed at the barrier they just passed through.

“Yeah, what is that?”

“The Archaic, they mastered the lands, they mastered the seas, they mastered the skies, they mastered the space, they mastered the stars and the sun. A mythical race that mastered everything, and one of their technologies is that barrier right above us. No. Not quite. It is around us. I recovered some old books about it. According to them, anything inside this dome causes time to move slower than the outside. For us a minute, for the people above, a second. Such powerful technology.”

“Oh, I guess we got plenty of time for us to look for a way out.”

“Way out? No. No, no, no, no, no. No. That is not my priority; uncovering hidden knowledge should be our first priority.”

“We can’t be here for too long. How about food and water? No matter how much slower time passes in here, we’ll die of hunger first before we could ever uncover anything meaningful,” said Victor as he walked up the path and toward the luminescence archway.

“Hm. Good point.”

“Are you coming?”

“Oh! Wait for me!” Gustav followed Victor into the adjacent structure.

“Sure, sure.”

“You look pretty calm for someone your age in this kind of circumstance.”

“I’ve been worse.”

“Oh, you must have a tough life.”

“Not really at first, but it got worse. Nowadays, I’m just used to it. I do wonder though, your name doesn’t really…”

“Fit me? Haha, I got that a lot. My mom was from Ghadah but my father was from Frozehaven. Does that explain anything?”

“Yeah, kinda. Is it true? The stuff you wrote?”

“If I have any more evidence I can prove it to the rest of the world, but so far, I only got a few of them, yet, all the evidence seems to point that I was right.”

“If that same explosion creates us, then could it create a being?”

“A being?”

“Yeah, like a girl, but not exactly a girl.”

“Hmm, the many mysteries of the Archaic, such as the mysterious disappearances of their race and the complexity of their inventions, but I think this girl you mention isn't a girl. I think it's purely a coincidence because if Archaic could create life then they would walk among us right this moment. However, it is all theoretical, I never saw someone born from a blast before. Did you?”

“N-no. Just a curious question.”

The sight was otherworldly, hovering structure resembling a library of a sort, but there’s no book present in the room. Only thousands of glowing twinkling lights in every shelf and some sort of rubbery rope that connected from the shelves and into the crystal chandelier above them. Gustav yelped in happiness as he rushed to one of the shelves, he touched one of it and appeared through a see-through glass with words appearing above his hands.

There’s a single small block of obsidian in the middle of the room, Victor walked toward it and hesitated to place a hand against it. However, after a second thought, he pressed his palm against it. Somehow his hand was stuck onto the surface, and he felt a slow rise of temperature on the surface. Victor tried to pull his arm away as his hand slowly felt the surface begin to sear his skin. Glowy veins started to spread from his hand up to his shoulder, sooner or later, his eyes were enveloped by a blazing light.

White.

Girl!

Death.

Melting.

Light!

Victor screamed out his pain before his hand was released and he immediately fainted to the floor. A plume of steam escaped his skin. There was nothing but darkness now.